"A train, 007 — pretty simple. Destroy the braking units in each carriage and the emergency systems should bring it to a halt."
— Q Branch briefing, GoldenEye 007 (1997)
The Russian Railway: Trains, Train Stations and the Trans-Siberian
The railway in Russia is not incidental infrastructure. It is, in a specific historical sense, the thing that made Russia what it is: the Trans-Siberian Railway, completed in 1916, bound together a territory that could not have been administered, settled, or defended without it; the Soviet railway network extended and militarized that inheritance, moving troops, evacuating industry eastward during the Second World War, supplying cities, and connecting a continental empire whose distances defeated every other form of transport. The train station — вокзал, vokzal — is accordingly a civic institution of a different order than its Western counterpart: in a country where the train is often the only link between regions, the station is a threshold between worlds, a site of departure and return charged with the weight of everything Russian literature has placed on those moments.
In video games, this inheritance is almost entirely absent. What appears instead is the railway as a tactical environment: a corridor of carriages to be cleared from one end to the other, a station building to be stormed and held, a stretch of track where the train itself becomes a weapon or a hazard. The Soviet train and the Russian station appear in games overwhelmingly as sites of violence — and this is true across genres, eras, and developer nationalities, with exceptions precise and instructive enough to be worth noting separately.
GoldenEye 007 — Train (1997)
The train level in GoldenEye 007 (Rare, 1997) is one of the most formally condensed examples of the railway-as-corridor in the medium. Mission 6-5, titled simply "Train," places James Bond at the rear of Alec Trevelyan's armored private train somewhere in the Russian interior, with the objective of destroying the braking units in each carriage to force it to a halt — Natalya Simonova is held hostage at the front, and General Ourumov is on board. The train is linear: six carriages, each loaded with Janus mercenaries, moving from back to front in a single undeviating direction. There is no station, no platform, no civilian presence. The entire level is a weapon — a steel tube moving through darkness at speed — and Bond moves through it the way a bullet moves through a barrel.
The level is preceded by "Depot," which introduces the train at a disused military depot in St. Petersburg: abandoned hangars, gloom, an illegal arms cache, and Trevelyan's converted missile train waiting at a siding. The depot is Soviet industrial space in a state of post-Soviet decomposition — official use abandoned, criminal use ongoing. That the train belongs to a former GRU agent turned crime lord encodes the Soviet railway network's post-1991 reality into the game's fiction without stating it directly: the infrastructure of the state, repurposed by the men who used to run it.
What the GoldenEye train sequence established — and what dozens of subsequent games would replicate — is the train carriage as the purest version of the corridor shooter: single direction, no flanking, enemies ahead, cover sparse and narrow. The Soviet context adds nothing beyond the name of the faction and the occasional Cyrillic stencil on the walls. But the level remains the cleanest articulation of the form.
Call of Duty (2003) and Call of Duty 2 (2005) — The Stalingrad Station
The Stalingrad train station appears in two separate Call of Duty titles and represents the other primary mode through which the Russian railway enters games: not the moving train as corridor, but the station building as contested military architecture. The real Stalingrad station — officially Volgogradsky Passazhirsky, rebuilt after its wartime destruction — changed hands repeatedly during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–43, a fact both games encode into their mission structures.
In the original Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003), Mission 17 — "Train Station" — sends Corporal Alexei Voronin through the station building to reach Major Zubov's headquarters. Voronin and a small Red Army squad move through the station lobby, up to the second floor, through German-held hallways, and across a catwalk overlooking the railyard, before dropping to the tracks and clearing the yard of defenders. The architecture is present — lobby, staircase, catwalk, railyard — but is used as a sequence of combat positions rather than as a civic space. There are no civilians, no trains in service, no departure boards. The station exists only as a set of corridors between the Germans and Major Zubov.
Call of Duty 2 (Infinity Ward, 2005) returns to the same ground with greater elaboration. "Railroad Station No. 1" — the fourth mission in the Soviet campaign — sends Private Vasili Koslov and his squad through an underground pipeline to infiltrate the German-held railyard from below, emerging into a warehouse and assaulting the station house from a flanking position. The station changes hands during the level: the Soviets take it, then defend it against a German counterattack backed by armored vehicles, then push out from it to clear the surrounding area. The pipeline approach is historically grounded — Soviet forces did use drainage systems and underground routes during the Stalingrad fighting — and gives the level a spatial complexity that the original CoD's frontal approach lacks. The station in this version is not just a destination but a hub: the axis around which four or five sub-objectives rotate.
Both games represent the Stalingrad station as a structure still recognizable as a railway terminus — high ceilings, catwalks, long platforms, railyard beyond — but stripped of everything that made it a civilian institution. What the games capture accurately, in their way, is the physical reality of Stalingrad station during the battle: it was not a train station during the fighting. It was a fortification.
Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix — Prague Station (2002)
The opening mission of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix (Raven Software, 2002) is a Cold War flashback set approximately fifteen years before the game's present day: operative John Mullins infiltrates Soviet-occupied Prague to extract a Russian scientist, Dr. Ivanovich, who wishes to defect. The setting is a Czech train station, and the level's contradiction announces itself immediately — it is technically Czechoslovakia, but the guards speak Russian, the military presence is Soviet, and the entire operational logic is that of a Soviet-controlled satellite state during the Cold War, where Czech institutions are staffed and enforced by Russian personnel. The train station itself, with its Central European architecture, reads as a border zone: Eastern Bloc space, Soviet authority, a Russian scientist trying to leave.
What makes this level architecturally distinctive is that it is one of the few instances in the genre where the train station has the physical layout of a real Central European terminus rather than a generic combat arena — high vaulted ceilings, platform architecture, a train actually present and used as part of the mission's resolution. The level ends with Mullins decoupling the engine from the rear cars and driving the train out of the station with the scientist aboard: the train as escape vehicle rather than combat corridor. The Soviet character of the space is imposed by occupation, not by design — which is itself historically accurate. Prague's Hlavní nádraží was Soviet-policed, not Soviet-built. The level captures this layering without theorizing it.
Mother Russia Bleeds — The Train (2016)
Chapter 4 of Mother Russia Bleeds (Le Cartel, 2016) — titled simply "The Train" — is the beat 'em up genre's most complete realization of the Soviet railway as a social environment before it becomes a combat one. The level opens at a Soviet-era railway station where the player characters meet Vlad and his revolutionary group: Romani gypsies traveling to Moscow under the cover of a peaceful protest. The station is populated — civilians, travelers, platforms — before the Bratva's enforcers arrive to prevent them from boarding. The fight begins there, at the station, in the ordinary civic space of departure.
The level then moves through three distinct registers of the same space. Inside the train, a drunk passenger harasses riders for alcohol money — a scene with the texture of actual Soviet train travel, with its culture of compartment sociability and its attendant conflicts — before the brawl spreads to the train inspectors trying to restore order. In the cargo car, a chainsaw becomes available. On the roof of the moving train, soldiers from an adjacent parallel train throw grenades across the gap while the players fight their way forward. On the open tracks at the destination station, the final boss — a Government Officer in full Soviet military dress — fights with Vlad throwing flashbangs from the sideline as environmental support.
What distinguishes the Mother Russia Bleeds train sequence from the genre standard is its layering. The railway station is established as a social space before it is a combat space; the train is established as a civilian space — passengers, an inspector, a busker — before it is a brawl venue. The game's alternate-1986 Soviet Union is consistent enough as a world that its train has the texture of the real thing before the violence strips that texture away. The train carriage with its проводник (train inspector) confronting a drunk — this is something with a specific Soviet social reality behind it, not simply a corridor with enemies at the end.
Metro 2033 and the Moscow Metro (2010 onwards)
The Metro series (4A Games, 2010–2019) occupies a category of its own in this Archive because it does not use the Soviet railway as a combat environment so much as it converts it into civilization. Metro 2033, adapted from Dmitry Glukhovsky's 2002 novel of the same name, is set in a post-nuclear Moscow where the survivors of a 2013 war live in the stations of the Moscow Metro system: sealed communities built in platforms and tunnels, each station a city-state, connected by tunnels patrolled by mutants. The train has ceased to exist as a vehicle; the station has become a home.
The specific gravity of the Moscow Metro as the game's setting derives from the real thing. The Moscow Metro — opened in 1935, expanded continuously through the Soviet period — was designed with civil defense in mind from the beginning: its stations are deep underground, with blast doors and filtration systems, capable of serving as shelters. The Soviet state built survivability into its flagship infrastructure project deliberately, and Glukhovsky's novel takes that fact seriously, constructing a post-apocalyptic society out of the architecture that already existed. The game inherits this and renders it with the fidelity of people who know what a Moscow Metro station looks like: the vaulted ceilings, the marble columns, the platform benches, the chandeliers that in some stations were still functioning in the fiction because the post-war communities had managed to maintain the generator.
The trains in the Metro games appear mostly as wrecks — derailed carriages blocking tunnels, burned-out hulks converted to sleeping quarters or barricades. The exception is the handcar and the occasional armored draisine used for travel between stations. The game does not give the player a functioning Soviet train; it gives the player the ruins of one, which have become the furniture of a new society. This is not the railway as combat corridor. It is the railway as archaeology.
The Stalin Subway — Metro-2 (2005)
The Stalin Subway (G5 Software / Buka Entertainment, 2005) — released in Russia under the title Метро-2 — is the only game in this Archive built entirely around the Moscow Metro as a functional Soviet institution still in operation. Set in 1952, it follows MGB officer Gleb Suvorov and GRU officer Natalia Mihaleva through a conspiracy against Stalin using the Metro and the secret Metro-2 line — the real parallel network, whose existence is officially unacknowledged but widely documented, running beneath the public Metro at greater depth and connecting key government installations. Missions take place in and between Metro stations, including shootouts in moving train carriages — the locomotive level as the game's recurring structural unit, Bond-style, but in a setting that is not a villain's private train but the actual public infrastructure of the Soviet state in its Stalinist peak.
The game was developed by a Russian studio and published by the Russian publisher Buka, and its relationship to the Moscow Metro is correspondingly specific. The station architecture is recognizable; the choice of Metro-2 as the conspiratorial layer beneath the public network is historically resonant rather than invented. It was largely unknown in the West and received limited critical attention outside Russia. Within this Archive, it belongs to the category of Russian-made productions that depict Russian infrastructure from the inside rather than reaching for it as exotic backdrop.
Russian Train Trip (2020 onwards)
At the opposite extreme from every title above sits Russian Train Trip and its sequel Russian Train Trip 2 (Steam, 2020–2022): first-person simulation games in which the player travels by passenger train from Moscow to Vladivostok — the full Trans-Siberian route, approximately 9,000 kilometres — over seven in-game days, stopping at eight major stations including Yekaterinburg, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, and Khabarovsk. The mechanics are minimal: look out the window, listen to the radio, move around the carriage. There is no combat, no mission structure, no antagonist.
The Trans-Siberian Railway is one of the most significant pieces of infrastructure in human history — the longest railway line in the world, crossing eight time zones, built at enormous human cost in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and fundamental to Russia's existence as a unified continental state. Its near-total absence from the medium's major productions — present only in these small simulation titles — is as revealing as the presence of the Stalingrad station in a dozen WWII shooters. The railway that made Russia possible does not appear in games as a place of power, drama, or military significance. It appears, when it appears at all, as a window to look out of.
What the Trope Excludes
The pattern across these titles is consistent. The Soviet or Russian railway appears in games as a site of violence — a corridor to clear, a station to storm, a train to commandeer or escape from. The social reality of the Russian train — the platzkart carriage with its open bunks and its culture of communal travel; the проводница dispensing tea in glass holders; the three-day journey from Moscow to the Urals with its specific domestic rhythms of eating, sleeping, and watching the birch forests pass — is almost entirely absent.
Mother Russia Bleeds gets closest, in its brief scene of the drunk passenger and the train inspector, to the texture of Soviet train travel as a social institution. The Russian Train Trip games get closest to the geography. The Metro series gets closest to the architecture. None of them, and nothing else in the Archive, depicts the Russian train as the ordinary Russians know it: the overnight journey, the shared compartment, the food brought from home, the tea, the gradual darkening of the window.
Notable Appearances
| Title | Railway Setting | Function |
|---|---|---|
| GoldenEye 007 (1997) | Trevelyan's armored private train, Russian interior; preceded by a disused military depot in St. Petersburg — mission "Depot" / "Train" | The definitive corridor-shooter train level: six carriages, one direction, no civilians; former GRU officer's converted missile train as post-Soviet criminal infrastructure |
| Call of Duty (2003) | Stalingrad railway station — mission "Train Station" | Station as contested military architecture; lobby, catwalk, and railyard as combat positions during the 1942–43 Stalingrad fighting; no civilian use, no functioning trains |
| Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix (2002) | Prague train station, Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia — Mission 1 | Central European station under Soviet military occupation; Russian-speaking guards; extraction of a Russian defector scientist; train used as escape vehicle rather than combat corridor — one of the few levels where the train departs |
| Call of Duty 2 (2005) | Stalingrad railway station — mission "Railroad Station No. 1" | Station taken via underground pipeline infiltration, defended against counterattack; more complex spatial and historical elaboration of the same Stalingrad ground as CoD 1 |
| The Stalin Subway / Метро-2 (2005) | Moscow Metro stations and the secret Metro-2 line, 1952 | The only game to use the Moscow Metro as a functioning Soviet public institution; Russian-developed; locomotive levels as the structural unit; conspiracy plotted through real and secret Soviet underground infrastructure |
| Metro 2033 (2010) and sequels | Moscow Metro system — all stations and tunnels | The station as post-apocalyptic civilization: platforms become cities, carriages become ruins and barricades; the Soviet Metro's built-in civil defense design as the premise for a post-nuclear society; developed by a Ukrainian studio from a Russian novel |
| Mother Russia Bleeds (2016) | Soviet-era railway station and moving passenger train — Chapter 4: "The Train" | The most socially layered train sequence in the genre: station as departure point for a revolutionary group, train as civilian space before it is a combat space; drunk passenger, train inspector, cargo car, rooftop — the Soviet train's social texture before violence strips it |
| Russian Train Trip (2020) / Russian Train Trip 2 (2022) | Trans-Siberian Railway — Moscow to Vladivostok, 8 stations across 7 days | The only treatment of the Trans-Siberian as its own subject: no combat, no mission structure; the window, the radio, the carriage — the railway that built Russia, represented as a journey rather than an arena |
Conclusion
The Russian railway in video games is almost universally a weapon or a battleground. The GoldenEye train is a steel tube full of armed men. The Stalingrad stations are fortifications. The Prague station is a Soviet security apparatus to be infiltrated and escaped from. Even Mother Russia Bleeds, which begins with a social space and populates it with the specific figures of Soviet train culture, makes the carriage into a brawl venue within minutes. The infrastructure that defines Russia's continental existence — that connected Vladivostok to Moscow, evacuated entire factories beyond the Urals during the German advance, moved generations of Russians between the places that determined their lives — exists in the medium almost exclusively as a corridor to clear.
The exceptions are revealing precisely because they are small: a Russian FPS set in 1952, largely unknown outside its domestic market; a Ukrainian developer's post-apocalyptic conversion of Metro architecture into civilization; a minimal simulation title with no mechanics beyond looking out the window. The Trans-Siberian does not appear in any major studio production as itself. The provodnitsa and her tea holders, the platzkart carriage at night, the taiga passing in darkness — these remain invisible. What games reach for instead is the train's violence potential: the locked corridor, the hostage in the forward car, the track beneath the wheels. The geography of an empire is reduced, repeatedly, to a shooting gallery on rails.